Coobina - Wildlife and Stygofauna

Such a busy time of year conducting fauna surveys for the mining industry, Coobina last week, Woodie Woodie this week and Port Headland next week. Will it last, seeing the government has recently announced a huge increase in mining taxes? Up to 40%, so miners aren't very happy and may cut back on projects.

Here are some pictures from the Coobina site survey east of Newman.

The survey site was a beautiful area, but birding was hard at this time of year, especially after a long hot and dry summer. The most exciting sight was a flock of 6 Ground Cuckoo-shrikes at the mine area.

A nice area to the north of the survey site.

This area was the home of a pair of Wedge-tailed Eagles. You can see the nest at the base of a tree on the right hand side of the picture.

The gorge area in the early morning.

A lot of trees in the local area had the scars from aborigines making shields. Some were recent ones made with metal axes, such as this one, and some were very old. This poor tree had 3 taken from it, resulting in it's death from ring-barking.

Collecting stygofauna from bore-holes was also the aim of this visit. There were 10 bores to sample with most being 80 metres deep and at most of them you need 8 samples (for small bore-holes - 14 samples). That's a lot of rope to be dropped and pulled up by hand. That's at least about six and half kilometres of rope to be pulled!

The stygofauna is caught in fine mesh funnels with a collection tube at the bottom.

If you want to know about the interesting animals called stygofauna, see this site. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stygofauna

Some of the wonderful patterns in the clay.

Shame it's just a holding pond for waste from the Chromite milling plant.

Even here at the holding pond life finds a way to live, with a beautiful Solanum species growing on the edge.